May Cafe (5/26): Dr. Moumita Das (RIT) -- The Touchy-feely Life of Living Cells

The Rochester Science Cafe is happy to announce the upcoming May Cafe, which will take place on Tuesday, May 26, 7pm at the Pittsford Plaza Barnes and Noble.   This will conclude the Spring 2015 Cafe series, but we will be back in September to begin our 2015-6 series, marking our 7th year running.

Tuesday's Cafe will be:

"The Touchy-feely Life of Living Cells"

Dr. Moumita Das

School of Physics and Astronomy, RIT

Living cells are the building blocks of all life. They are highly mechanically active and sensitive. For example they can divide and proliferate, migrate to distant locations within an organism, engulf other entities and exert forces on their surroundings. The ability of cells to perform these functions crucially depends on how they physically interact with each other and their environment, i.e. how they ``feel’’ mechanical forces in their surroundings and how “squishy” they are, i.e. how they change shape and remodel in response to these mechanical forces. This touchy-feely response of cells has important consequences. For example, some adult stem cells can become bone, muscle, fat, neurons or other types of tissue depending on the "feel" of their physical environment.  Also, how cells respond to physical forces undergoes important changes during tumor invasion and metastasis, the processes that make most cancers lethal. In this talk we will discuss how living cells and tissues use physics to their advantage and how physical properties influence their functions and fate.

Dr. Moumita Das is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Rochester Institute of Technology. She obtained her doctorate at the Indian Institute of Physics Bangalore, India on the physics of liquid crystals and colloids. She then shifted focus to researching the physics of living systems, especially cell mechanics and migration. She did her postdoctoral research at Harvard University, University of California Los Angeles and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands). Her current research interests lie in the interface between Biology and Physics.

We hope to see everyone there!

March Cafe: 3/24: "What does it mean to do mathematical research?" -- Dr. Paul Wenger and Dr. Nathan Cahill (RIT)

The Rochester Science Cafe is happy to announce the upcoming March Cafe, which will take place on Tuesday, March 24, 7pm at the Pittsford Plaza Barnes and Noble:


"What does it mean to do mathematical research?"
Dr. Paul Wenger and Dr. Nathan Cahill
School of Mathematical Sciences, RIT

Come join two members of RIT's math program as they discuss the different directions taken by modern-day mathematicians, and how disparate skills are used to formulate new and exciting research projects. Paul Wenger works on graph theory, a field that studies networks and connectedness, while Nathan Cahill works on topics including medical image computing. Here, they will talk about their various projects, including they ways in which "pure" and "applied" mathematicians are increasingly collaborating. Upon request, they will also recreate scenes from the movie "Good Will Hunting", though the quality of their Bah-ston accents is questionable.

For the remainder of the Spring 2015 series, our talks will be:


April 28
Exploring our Atmosphere's Unknown Chemistry
Dr. Nathan Eddingsaas, RIT


May 26
The Touchy-feely Life of Living Cells
Dr. Moumita Das, RIT

February Science Cafe -- "Hunting for the Darkest Galaxies" -- Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti (RIT)

Hi everyone, for our February Cafe, which takes place tomorrow, February 24, 7:00 pm at the Pittsford Plaza Barnes and Noble, our speaker and topic will be:

"Hunting for the Darkest Galaxies"
Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti
Asst. Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy, RIT

Dark matter is elusive. Since it does not emit electromagnetic radiation, it has been difficult to characterize. I will describe my work in developing a method to characterize dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxies from analyzing their gravitational effects on larger galaxies. I will review an earlier prediction I made for a new dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way based on an analysis of ripples in the outskirts of our Galaxy. Our recent discovery of clustered Cepheid variables 300,000 light years from the Galactic center validates this earlier prediction. Thus, we may now have a viable means of hunting for the darkest galaxies in the universe.

More updates on the remainder of the  Spring schedule, with talks in March, April, and May, will follow shortly.

January Science Cafe: "Conversing with computers to improve social skills" - Dr. M. Ehasn Hoque (UofR)

Conversing with computers to improve social skills

Dr. M. Ehsan Hoque
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Director of the  the Human Computer Interaction (ROC HCI) Lab

University of Rochester

 From his website (see also http://www.cs.rochester.edu/hci/)

What inspires my work?

"Is it possible to interact with computers and robots the way we interact with each other?" -- my research efforts are driven by this question. In particular, I work on developing techniques to understand and recognize human nonverbal behaviors, and inventing new applications to improve people's quality of life.  

Why is it difficult and how do I solve it?

Nonverbal behavior understanding and recognition concern modeling of complex, multidimensional data with subtle, uncertain and overlapping labels. I tackle these problems in context of Human-Computer Interactions while combining techniques from machine learning, computer vision, insights from psychology, algorithms and a great deal of computation. I aspire to deploy my research into the real world to generate new data and new findings to address scientific challenges that we could not solve before.

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As always, we'll be in the community room at the Pittsford Plaza Barnes and Noble.  

Our February Cafe will be

February 24: Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti (RIT)

"Hunting the Darkest Galaxies"

and the series will continue on through May, with more talks being announced soon.

November Science Cafe: Dr. Jack Werren (UofR): "Influential Passengers: Bacterial Symbionts That Manipulate Their Hosts"

On November 25, the Rochester Science Cafe is extremely pleased to present:

Influential Passengers: Bacterial Symbionts That Manipulate Their Hosts

Dr. John (Jack) Werren, Ph.D.

Nathaniel & Helen Wisch Professor of Biology

University of Rochester

We are not alone. All animals and plants live with countless bacteria—our “microbiomes”. Some of these bacteria are just transient vagabonds, or unwelcome guests that cause disease and discomfort. Others maintain long-term associations with their “hosts” and can be beneficial….at least some of time. These influential passengers have been around for a long time and have shaped the very origins and evolution of animals and plants. They continue to do so, influencing everything from nutrition to sex in their hosts. Among them are “the coolest microbes on the planet”, a bacterial group call Wolbachia that play sex games with their insect hosts, and are now being recruited in our battles with insect vectored diseases such as dengue and malaria. In this café we will explore the lives of symbiotic bacteria and their hosts, how and why these microbes manipulate their hosts, and what hosts have to say about it. ​

As always, Cafes will be at 7pm in the Community room of the Pittsford Plaza Barnes and Noble.  As a reminder, we will be off in December, and our January Cafe will be:

January 27: "Conversing with computers to improve social skills"
Dr. M. Ehsan Hoque, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Rochester

October Science Cafe: Dr. Vera Gorbunova (UofR): “Aging research: The search for the fountain of youth”

On October 28, the Rochester Science Cafe is extremely pleased to present:

 “Aging research: The search for the fountain of youth”
 Dr. Vera Gorbunova, Ph.D.
Professor of Biology
University of Rochester

Everybody wants to live a long and healthy life. Understanding the molecular mechanisms of longevity is of utmost importance because if we learn how to slow down aging we will be able to delay the onset of multiple age-related diseases. Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer disease are all the symptoms of aging; by delaying aging it will be possible to prevent or delay all of them by treating the cause rather than a symptom. Animal species differ dramatically in their longevity and resistance to cancer. For example, mice live 3 years and often develop tumors while similarly sized naked mole rats live over 30 years and are virtually cancer proof. Our goal is to identify mechanisms that allow such exceptionally long-lived animals to live long and healthy lives and then use these mechanisms to benefit human health. I will describe one success story in which we identified a single molecule in the longest-lived rodent the naked mole rat, which is responsible for remarkable cancer resistance of this species, and could be applied to benefit human health.​

As always, Cafes will be at 7pm in the Community room of the Pittsford Plaza Barnes and Noble.

For those who are interested, here is a writeup in the NY Times of her work with her lab on naked mole rats and aging, and also a description of the $9.5 million award her lab recently recieved to study longevity.

Future cafe topics and speakers:

• November 25: “Influential Passengers: Bacterial Symbionts That Manipulate Their Hosts”
  Dr. John (Jack) Werren, Ph.D.
  Nathaniel & Helen Wisch Professor of Biology
  University of Rochester 


• January 27: "Conversing with computers to improve social skills"
  Dr. M. Ehsan Hoque, Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor
  Department of Computer Science
  University of Rochester

September Cafe Abstract: Dr Duncan Moore (UofR): Mirages, Malaysia Air Flight 370 and Other Interesting Optical Phenomena

September 23: Dr. Duncan Moore, Ph.D.
Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor of Optical Engineering
Vice Provost for Center for Entrepreneurship
University of Rochester

Mirages, Malaysia Air Flight 370 and Other Interesting Optical Phenomena

What do ocean waves, optical waves, seismic waves, and acoustic waves have in common?  In most materials the composition varies as a function of x, y, and z.  This talk will tie together these four phenomena and describe one of the difficulties of locating Malaysia Air Flight 370 while the pingers were still active.​